1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the disclosure relate in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, it relates to providing graphical completion status information for the management of serial computer operations that are forked into parallel operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional computer applications often use a graphical progress indicator to provide users feedback about the completion status of computer operations as they are being performed. Progress indicators are often used during software installations, lengthy calculations, and automated test executions while back-end logs and trace files of the procedures are being written. The typical progress bar provides the user with an estimate of how much time it will take to complete the entire operation and an indication of how much progress has been made thus far.
Prior art approaches have included progress bars, which include a completion progress indicator that comprises a plurality of progress indicator segments. Completed progress indicator segments are generally depicted in a graphical user interface (GUI) as one color and uncompleted progress indicator segments in another. As increments of progress are achieved, the number of completed progress indicator segments increase and the number of uncompleted progress segments decrease. While completion progress indicators may provide some indication of how complete a series of computer operations may be, or an estimate of the time remaining until completion, they typically do not provide completion detail about individual operations. Another approach is to combine a checklist of computer operations with a time remaining progress indicator. The computer operation checklist generally comprises a list of computer operations, each of which has a corresponding graphical icon to symbolize operations that were completed successfully, with errors, or with failures. While the progress indicator with checklist provides a summary of computer operations and their corresponding status through graphical icons, it does not provide meaningful detail about failed operations.
Today's large enterprise applications are often comprised of multiple software components and sub-applications. In recent years it has become common to implement these large applications in complex computing environments that include multi-processor machines, clusters of servers, and distributed computers connected by a network. Despite their size and complexity, the installation process of these applications is often performed serially. However, the installation of individual components can often be performed in parallel, especially when multiple target machines are involved. When this is the case, it is challenging to discern the individual progress of these parallel processes with a single progress bar. As a result, it would be advantageous to present multiple progress bars to the user as a serial process forks into multiple, parallel processes. Furthermore, there are times when a series of computer operations are begun, only to later determine that it may be desirable to retarget one, or all, of the application components to a different machine. It would be similarly advantageous to be able to re-target the operation of an application or process by selecting their respective progress indicator segments and graphically retargeting them without interrupting the overall process. However, current progress indicator approaches are serially oriented for the overall process and require the user to wait until all parallel operations have been completed, or ended prematurely, to change the targeting of individual application components.